Free In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" by Phil Brown

farmer continued, “Come, I will show you your room.”
    “Sam, the young man won’t stay here,” his wife said.
    “He will stay here, eat here, and be satisfied,” the farmer replied, “and if you don’t like it, go back to Orchard Street together with your daughter. Parasites, pigs, paskudas !”
    The farmer put the spade and the stick into a corner, grabbed my valise, and went outside. My room had a separate entrance with its own flight of stairs. I saw a huge field overgrown with weeds. Near the house was a well and an outhouse like in a Polish shtetl. A bedraggled horse was nibbling on some grass. Farther away there was a stable, and from it came the plaintive cry of the animal, which had not stopped in all this time. I said to the farmer, “If your cow is in heat, why doesn’t she get what she needs?”
    “Who told you that she’s in heat? It is a heifer and I just bought her. She was taken from a stable where there were thirty other cows and she misses them. She most probably has a mother or a sister there.”
    “I’ve never seen an animal that yearns so much for her kin,” I said.
    “There are all kinds of animals, but she will quiet down. She’s not going to yell forever.”
     
2
     
    The steps leading into my room squeaked. One held on to a thick rope instead of a banister. The room smelled of rotting wood and bedbug spray. A stained, lumpy mattress with the filling sticking out of the holes was on the bed. It wasn’t especially hot outside but inside the room the heat immediately began to hammer at my head and I became wet with perspiration. Well, one night here will not kill me, I comforted myself. The farmer set my valise down and went to bring linen. He brought a pillow in a torn pillowcase, a coarse sheet with rusty spots, and a cotton-filled blanket without a cover. He said to me, “It’s warm now, but the moment the sun sets, it will be deliciously cool. Later on you will have to cover yourself.”
    “It will be all right.”
    “Are you from New York?” he asked me.
    “Yes, New York.”
    “I can tell from your accent that you were born in Poland. What part do you come from?”
    I mentioned the name of my village and Sam told me he came from a neighboring village. He said, “I’m not really a farmer. This is our second summer here in the country. Since I came from Poland I was a presser in New York. I pulled and pushed the heavy iron so long that I got a rupture. I always longed for fresh air and, how do you call it—Mother Earth—fresh vegetables, a fresh egg, green grass. I began to look for something in the newspapers and here I found a wild bargain. I bought it from the same man who sold me the heifer. He lives about three miles from here. A fine man, even though he’s a Gentile. His name is Parker, John Parker. He gave me a mortgage and made everything easy for me, but the house is old and the earth is full of rocks. He did not, God forbid, fool me. He told me everything beforehand. To clean up the stones would take twenty years. And I’m not a young man any more. I’m already over seventy.”
    “You don’t look it,” I complimented him.
    “It’s the good air, the work. I worked hard in New York, but only here I started to work for real. There we have a union, it should live long, and it did not allow the bosses to make us slaves like the Jews in Egypt. When I arrived in America, the sweatshops were still in existence, but later on things got easier. I worked my eight hours and took the subway home. Here I toil eighteen hours a day and, believe me, if I did not get the pension from the union I could not make ends meet. But it’s all right. What do we need here? We have our own tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers. We have a cow, a horse, a few chickens. The air itself makes you healthy. But how is it written in Rashi? Jacob wanted to enjoy peace but the misfortune with Joseph would not allow it. Yes, I studied once; until I was seventeen I sat in the study house and learned.